A few years ago, after reading this blog post by Jeff Atwood, we started handing out rubber ducks to new hires in Wayfair Engineering, to encourage self-reliance and good questions in mentoring situations. We have accumulated a lot of ducks over the years throughout the department, but our Search Technologies…

That’s a heat map of 3 months of Wayfair North American orders, exported via Logstash from our relational orders database into Elasticsearch, and visualized with Kibana 4. For some time now, ELK, or Elasticsearch / Logstash / Kibana, has been our opensource platform for text-based log messages, complemented by Graphite…

PHP7 is out. This isn’t news. It’s been out since last December, with nine minor revisions since then. What’s new is that it’s serving all of Wayfair’s customer-facing traffic. Performance-wise, PHP7 is the rocket ship people said it would be. We’re nothing but pleased. If you can upgrade, you should do…

There’s a great interview with our own Matt DeGennaro by Paul Krill of Infoworld that came out a few days ago. The topic is Tungsten.js, our awesome framework that ‘lights up’ the DOM with fast, virtual-DOM-based updates, React-style, and can be integrated with Backbone.js and pretty much whatever other framework…

For the past couple years, Wayfair’s front-end stack has relied heavily on Mustache templates. They’ve let our growing front-end team focus on the front-end. They allow us to share more code between server and client as we push towards a Tungsten-powered future. Anyone who’s seen a Mustache template knows that…

Performance is top priority here at Wayfair, because improved performance means an improved customer experience. A significant piece of web performance is the time it takes to render, or generate, the markup for a page. Over the last several months we’ve worked hard to improve the render performance on our…

Cari, who is a developer on our SEO team, just wrote a Chrome extension that’s up on both github (https://github.com/wayfair/nofollow_highlighter) and the Chrome web store (click here to add to Chrome). If you don’t know this subject matter, here’s a classic explanation from Matt Cutts of Google, from a few…

Matt DeGennaro and Andrew Rota of our Javascript team recently spoke at the BostonJS meetup on a library we have written called Tungstenjs, which we have opensourced today. It takes the fast-virtual-dom-update idea from React.js and makes it usable with other frameworks, including Backbone.js. It ships with a Backbone adapter….

I wrote a post last year on consistent hashing for Redis and Memcached with ketama: http://engineering.wayfair.com/consistent-hashing-with-memcached-or-redis-and-a-patch-to-libketama/. We’ve evolved our system a lot since then, and I gave a talk about the latest developments at Facebook’s excellent Data@Scale Boston conference in November: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLjryfUZPXU. We have some updates to both design and…

Wayfair Engineering places special emphasis on software testing as a means of maintaining stability in production. The DevTools team, which I am a member of, has built and integrated a number of tools into our development and deploy process in order to catch errors as early as possible, especially before…

We write a lot of PHP unit tests at Wayfair, and we want to be able to run them as fast as possible, which seems like a good use case for parallelization. Running tests in parallel is not built in to PHPUnit, but there are ways to do it. When…